The return of Orestes to avenge his father's death was good material for tragedy since it provided at any rate the possibility of a tragic dilemma. Thus in the Oresteia Orestes cannot deny the duty to avenge his father, a duty imposed by public opinion and divine command; but he cannot do this without killing his mother, an act that involves pollution and is also repugnant to the deepest instincts. In mythological terms he will inevitably be pursued either by the Erinyes of his father or by those of his mother. Aeschylus stresses the divine command, repeated at a crucial moment when Pylades breaks silence at Cho. 900, and presents Orestes as essentially guiltless, caught in a tragic dilemma, and eventually after much suffering purified and absolved. In Euripides the divine command is still there, though its validity is questioned both before and after the matricide, and Orestes is still faced with a dilemma, though he and Electra (who now becomes much more prominent) are presented in a less sympathetic light; in the main part of the play Euripides clearly invites us to condemn their action, and it is only in the epilogue that the mitigating circumstance of Apollo's command is emphasized and ultimate acquittal on Aeschylean lines is foreshadowed. In Sophocles the killing of Clytemnestra is approved even if not expressly commanded by Apollo, and it is not surprising that Orestes should be presented as justified. What has surprised many critics is that the dilemma seems to have disappeared: Orestes never has any doubts or qualms, nor indeed has anybody else in the play, and some have felt that this leaves Sophocles open to the charge of ‘moral obtuseness’. In 1927 J. T. Sheppard came to the rescue with an article entitled ‘In Defence of Sophocles’ (CR 41 (1927), 2–9) containing a new interpretation, which has now been revived and persuasively argued by J. H. Kells in his valuable edition of the play (Cambridge, 1973). Briefly it is that Sophocles is actually condemning the act of matricide quite as strongly as Euripides, not as explicitly but rather by means of ‘a series of subtle but forceful dramatic touches’, and that the play is ‘a continuous exercise in dramatic irony’. By this means Sophocles is inviting his audience not of course to condone the crime of Clytemnestra, but to condemn Orestes and Electra as murderers, and to see Electra, before the killing of her mother, as overwrought to the point of mental derangement and delusion, but ‘like many mad people hard-headed and cunning in achieving her ends’.

Now that many students of ancient civilization, whether at school or at university, are necessarily studying the ancient sources in translation, it has become more important than ever that the translations should be accurate. It is true that some errors make little or no difference to the interpretation; for instance, it does not really affect Thucydides' explanation at 3.15 of the reluctance of Sparta's allies to take part in a second invasion of Attica in 428 to bring relief to Mytilene that Warner (Penguin Classics, revised edition 1972, p. 201) translates ἐν καρпο ξυγκομιδσαν as ‘were busy in harvesting their corn’, when the chronology makes it clear than the time is August and well after the corn harvest. It is true also that a good many errors will be noticed by the teacher or tutor who knows Greek (or, as the case may be, Latin) or suspected even by his pupils as a result of reading some modern comment or interpretation (as in the case cited above) or of comparing different translations, although either of these exercises, especially the latter, may merely suggest that there is legitimate doubt and one may have some degree of choice about which version to follow. I should like, however, to offer one case affecting a historical episode which falls within a good many syllabuses, where the translations are in agreement, but seem to me to have got it wrong, where the structure of the Greek has not, as far as I know, been discussed in any commentary and where, I think, it does matter which meaning is taken.

The following is the fourth of the series which began in G & R 20 (1973), 38 ff. and 155 ff. and was continued in G & R 21 (1974), 165 ff. and in the current volume, 70 ff.

‘The Blinding of the Ogre’, a widespread folktale, has long fascinated and stimulated man's imagination. By far the earliest known version of the story appears in Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey, but the current scholarly consensus holds that this tale is earlier than Homer, was borrowed by the poet, and has survived independently in oral tradition down to modern times. In attempting to explore its origins, I must emphasize at the outset that I am not concerned here with the physical, geographical origin of the story–a problem which has thus far proved insoluble. Rather, my focus will be on the deeper, less tangible origin of the myth: is it possible to discover the idea, the significance, perhaps some symbolism or psychological appeal which lies at the root of the story and might help to explain its astonishing endurance and popularity in oral traditions spanning three continents and three millennia?

There is no novelty in suggesting the importance of Roman coins as a source for the study of Roman history; a considerable number of works have explored the possibilities of the subject. The chief problem, however, has always lain in appreciating how far they can take us in an understanding of events: the coins are after all often as tendentious as the literary sources are sometimes alleged to be–or even more so. Further, when the historian moves from attempting to explain the legends to such matters as interpreting features of the portraiture, he is moving on to very subjective ground: for example, what may be the significance of the fact that on Nerva's Divvs Avgvstvs coins, the portrait of Augustus begins to look uncannily like that of Nerva himself? Or again, what are we to make of the fact that the obverse portrait on early coins of Trajan bears a resemblance to that of Nerva?

This Note is a supplement to J. C. Davies's discussion of the Republic's declaration that when the philosophers of the kallipolis have been trained in dialectic, they must be compelled to forsake pure contemplation of the forms and return to the Cave to rule (519 c–520d).

There is some ancient evidence, and much more modern conjecture, about the existence of Medizers in Athens during the period 508–480 B.c. The present article attempts to take further the clarification of the term Medism which was begun by A. W. Gomme, and to suggest that there has been too uncritical an acceptance of the label in many, if not most, of the cases to which it has been applied.